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general in command and signaling his “instructions” to the ground. He and Loerzer attended staff conferences which would normally have been closed to such junior men—but their advice was sought and the photographs they had taken needed their expert interpretation. In this way Goering became known to Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm himself. It did not take Goering long to realize that the future of the war for him lay in the air, and that it was necessary for him to become a pilot. He went back to the flying school at Freiburg, where he gained his wings in record time and boasted that he never crashed a machine. In October 1915 he became a Jagdflieger , a “pursuit flyer,” or fighter pilot. Goering and Loerzer were members of Jagdstaffel 5, a section of the new armada of twin-engine fighter planes which Germany was putting into the air on the western front.
    The British had just introduced the huge Handley-Page bomber to meet the rapidly evolving strategy in air warfare. One misty November day the new pilot saw a black giant flying ahead in the clouds, and without thought he plunged in to secure a closer view and, if possible, wing the aircraft with his machine guns. He was alone; he had taken no heed, as his fellow pilots had done, of the fact that there were British fighters in the vicinity. Goering moved in close, marveling at the great machine with guns set in its tail as well as amidships. He put one gunner out of action and then another, for the maneuverability of his aircraft was far greater than that of the Handley-Page. He set one of its engines on fire. Then suddenly he was being strafed by a descending swarm of Sopwith fighters, who turned and twisted about him. His engine was hit and his tank was holed; then he was wounded and his senses began to leave him as his machine stalled and faltered. With fuel pouring into the cockpit, he did what he could to control the plane, which was falling now toward the enemy lines and would soon be in range of the machine-gun fire from the ground. The fighters had gone, but his plane was spinning down through mist and cloud. It was the machine-gun fire from below that shook him into action. He put the plane’s nose up and hedge-hopped back into German territory with what was left of his fuel and crash-landed into the cemetery of a church that was being used as a hospital. He was operated upon for a serious wound in the hip from which he might easily have bled to death had expert care not been immediately available. They counted sixty bullet holes in the fuselage of his plane.
    Goering was immobilized for the greater part of a year. While he was convalescing he had his first recorded love affair, with a girl named Marianne Mauser, the beautiful daughter of a well-to-do farmer near Mauterndorf. Her parents were undistinguished, but even so they did not permit the young couple to reach the point of an engagement. Herr Mauser regarded the matter shrewdly: a flyer might be a romantic figure, but his expectation of life, unfortunately, was short.
    While Goering slowly recovered, the new concept of the “air ace” was being created on the battlefronts. The fighter pilot who faced death in a deadly duel of wits with men as skilled in endurance as himself, and who flew high above the mud and degradation of earthbound warfare, became a new hero whose photograph stole the publicity. The names of Richthofen and Udet became admired alike by the Germans and the Allies, because their exploits or those of their comrades made exciting news. Loerzer was appointed commandant of Field Squadron 26, based at Mulhouse, where Goering joined him again on his discharge from hospital in 1916. In Aachen one bright day, Loerzer saved Goering’s life when he was being set upon by three French fighters; once more he only just made the ground with a machine punctured by bullets, its undercarriage in fragments. But Goering had done the same for Loerzer on a previous occasion.